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  “Where was he?” he asked.

  “West rooftop, 200 meters from target building. Female. Armed with a rifle.”

  “I'll find her.”

  “I'll take the north,” said Eldritch. “Converge on that position.”

  I felt my heart racing. I was a sitting duck but moving wasn't an option. I couldn't drop down a drain pipe in this state and there was nowhere else to run. The only comfort I had was that she hadn't shot me already.

  “I'm going up,” said Mason. “On your seven, Carter.”

  I looked. I saw him climbing the drain pipe across from me and halt just before the top, peering over.

  “You're clear,” I said. “I have full eyes-on.”

  He finished, laying low on the roof, one of the enemy rifles in his hands just like me. Then he raised himself into a crouch and moved towards a similar unit, taking cover behind it.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “I've got nothing,” I said. “Moving to the north end. Stay frosty.”

  I got up and part of me expected to feel the impact of a shot. There was nothing. I hurried forward to the next unit, paused, then moved onto the next until I was close to the edge of the roof. For some strange reason, I noticed the sensation of cold rainwater trickling down my inner thigh and it caused me to shiver.

  “I'm in position,” said Eldritch. “Nothing yet.”

  “Keep an eye on her exits,” said Mason. “She could have fled by now.”

  I stared and realized that the painkillers were kicking in, making me drowsy. My vision swam and I regretted hitting the dose twice.

  “I'm losing combat effectiveness,” I said. “I'm tapping out.”

  “Understood,” said Mason and I was thankful that we'd had years of working together to bypass our pride. “Hold position and provide cover fire. I'm moving on.”

  I leaned back against the metal casing and sighed, dropping to one knee and aiming ahead of Mason. As he reached the edge he looked about, saw that the gap was narrow enough to the next roof, and leaped. As he did so, a flash of red lit up the area and a bolt streaked past him, barely missing.

  “I'm under fire!” he roared as he rolled into cover. “Did anyone see it?”

  “Eyes on tango!” I cried. “Engaging!”

  I pointed in roughly the right direction and fired, sending a burst towards the muzzle flash I'd seen. Then, throwing myself back behind the unit, I was just in time to see two more shots slam into where I'd just been kneeling. I fired again and again, keeping suppression on the target as Mason tracked her position.

  “Engaging!” he cried and stood up, firing into the glowing spot I was hitting. She'd gone.

  “Anything?” I asked.

  “Eyes on!” cried Eldritch and I heard his pistol firing. “She's heading north-west, towards the heat exchanger.”

  “I'm following,” said Mason.

  I saw him running, hitting the next rooftop hard as he gained on her. Then he vanished out of sight.

  “I see her,” he said over the comms. “Firing.”

  More flashes. Some cursing.

  “I'm on your three,” said Eldritch. “I still see her.”

  “She's fast, I'll give her that.”

  The waiting was killing me so I got up and stumbled towards another drain pipe, cutting the bandage from the stock and letting the thing swing onto my back. Then, with excruciating pain, I made the long descent down to ground level.

  “Firing!” said Mason again. “Missed.”

  “She's changing direction,” said Eldritch. “Heading north now. I think there's a vehicle in the air.”

  “What?”

  “A speeder. It's hovering. Must be their exfil.”

  “Last chance,” he said. “Firing... That's a hit.”

  “She's down!”

  “Where?”

  “Over the edge. I'm nearly there... Oh shit. She's dead.”

  “Confirmed?”

  “Rail spike through her neck almost severed her head from her shoulders. I'm pretty sure she's gone.”

  I found Thor holding the prisoner in his grasp, still in the shadows. In spite of the damage done to his secondary body, he was still operational and hadn't gone full psycho just yet. Held firmly in his arms was the decoy from before, a man of reasonable height, maybe two meters with a closely cropped head of bristling black hair, a pock-scarred face and a taut, toned body. He now bore a number of cuts, having had the combat chassis torn from his body without the proper protocols and they wept gently into his close-knit midnight colored combats.

  “Good work,” I said.

  “Thankee, sir,” Thor replied, appearing a little happier now. “He has one of them thingies, sir. On his neck, like.”

  “I guessed he would.”

  “Are you injured badly, sir?” he asked. I shook my head.

  “Broken wrist. Hurts like hell but I'll live. What about you?”

  “Just a scratch, sir. A bit of paintwork will-” He paused, blurted out a string of random phrases that made no sense, then stopped. “I think one of those shooters hit my processors, sir. I must've got meself that too-retts fingy.”

  “Hang in there. We'll get you patched up.”

  We waited and the soldier said nothing. Mason and Eldritch would check the corpses before coming back. I had time to sit for a moment. The guy watched me with a predator's interest.

  “Name?” I asked him as I slumped against the wall. Nothing. “Rank? Serial number? Health insurance? Last dental appointment? Nothing?” Silence. “Have it your way. But Thor here, he has ways of making you talk.”

  The bot said nothing. I laughed to myself which was probably a result of the meds and closed my eyes just as the world began to fade out of focus.

  16

  The salts burned my nose the way battery acid might. Whether he planned it or not, the effect made me shake my head away, slamming the right side of my face against the wall. Mason laughed.

  “What the hell?” I cried. “Why do that?”

  “I couldn't help it, buddy. How's the arm?”

  I looked at my wrist. It was twice its normal size.

  “Good as new,” I said. “Don't give up your day job and become a corpsman, right?”

  I got to my feet and saw that I'd only been out for a few minutes. It was still raining and it was still dark but the air stank of ozone and scorched metal. The meds were wearing off and my arm began to ache.

  “Has he said anything?” I asked. Mason shook his head.

  “Either he's one of the team we're looking for or he's here for the same reasons we are – to hunt them down.”

  “Well I'm getting tired of this,” I snapped, looking at the prisoner. “Either he talks or we waste him. I've spent enough of my time on these clowns. If he is some kind of elite team then I'm not impressed – they came apart too easy for my liking.”

  “Or maybe we're better than them,” said Mason.

  “The thought had crossed my mind.” I walked towards our prisoner and grabbed his chin with my left hand, yanking his eyes towards mine. “Talk or die. It's that simple.”

  Nothing.

  “Last chance.”

  Still nothing. Just that glazed stare, not quite looking at me, not quite not looking at me. Just... not there somehow.

  “Thor.”

  “Yessir!”

  “You have my permission to tear one of his legs off in the next six seconds. Understood?”

  “Sir?”

  “That one,” I pointed to his left leg. “I want that one, preferably in one piece. Pull at his thigh so his hip dislocates first. The flesh will tear pretty good then.”

  “Understood sir,” said the bot and clamped his third arm around the man's thigh just below his groin. His eyes flashed terror much the way the other soldier's had. “Now?”

  “Countdown from six, okay?”

  “Understood.”

  I continued to stare at him. Horror. Panic. Fear. They were like ice cubes in a tumbler, bouncing
around in a cocktail of emotions he didn't want to be feeling. Without realizing it I'd stuffed my bad wrist into one of my pockets to try and relieve the pain and my fingers touched the plastic evidence bag that held the strange implant. The moment they made contact I felt a surge of terror grip me, loosening my bowels and making my head spin. I let go.

  “Thor!” I cried. “Stop.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  I took the bag out of my pocket with some difficulty and held it up, making sure I didn't touch it directly.

  “What is it?” asked Eldritch. “You look pale.”

  “I felt it,” I said, looking at the soldier. “I felt what he was feeling.”

  “Where did you get that?” he suddenly cried in a deeply accented voice. Sirakosen maybe? One of the Commonwealth planets?

  “Off one of the team you sent to kill us,” said Mason.

  “You had no right.”

  “I had every right,” I said.

  “Not you,” he replied. “Him.” He nodded towards Eldritch who shrugged.

  “Nice to be loved.”

  “But your comrades seemed happy to nail the rest of us too. Seems a little unkind to me. I'd never even met them. No flowers. No lunch.”

  “He was digging too deep. He still is.”

  “I don't really care that much,” I pointed out. The pain in my wrist was fast becoming unbearable. “And I don't care for elaborate interrogations either. I want to know if you're part of the team who body-guarded for General Bourmont during the Mars campaign or not.”

  “What does it matter to you?”

  “It matters a lot. Believe me.”

  “Must be worth something?”

  “It's worth that leg to you, pal. Decide now – I'm in a lot of pain and I'd like to deal with it.”

  He stared at me, looked at both Mason and Eldritch and figured that he liked his leg more than his reputation as an operative.

  “Fair enough. Can the bot take his hand off my leg first?”

  I gestured to Thor who paused for a moment, made some more random noise and then withdrew the arm. The soldier nodded his thanks.

  “You're not after us for the guns, are you?” he said. “I can see that.”

  I looked at Eldritch who shrugged.

  “I get paid by the hour,” he said. “I don't really care. I'd like it to stop though just so I have something to put in my report to Sargon PD.”

  “You a freelancer?” asked the soldier. Eldritch nodded. “Figures.”

  “Why?”

  “No Sargon pig would put the effort in that you've done over the last six months.”

  “I needed a break,” said Eldritch. “I got one a day or so ago but you kinda messed up by coming after me. Made my job a lot simpler.”

  “Always a risk.”

  “Well this is nice,” said Mason. “But can we get out of here before his friends show up?”

  “Friends?” said the soldier. “You just killed the last of us. Shana and me, we were going to split Sargon for the Commonwealth before you arrived. They're all gone now. We took a big risk in coming after you, but it didn't pay off.”

  “Bummer for you,” said Eldritch. “But at least I get my report done.”

  We left the industrial complex and returned to the cab, soaked and tired. It'd been a long day, or night, whichever way you looked at it and I needed to get my wrist seen to. Our prisoner came along willingly without Thor needing to restrain him. I guessed that for him only one option remained now – to fully comply in the hopes of winning our trust and negotiating some kind of release. I didn't tell him this, but if I got what I wanted then he could go sing in the local barbershop quartet for the rest of his life for all I cared. Right there and then he was my last hope for Angel, a bargaining chip to put down against Argo's ally, the former Chief of Staff Wash.

  The cab took us to a run-down part of the city in the southern quarter. It took too long. My wrist was swollen and turning a nasty shade of purple and the second dose of pain relief I took didn't even touch it. The only plus was that the clothing we'd bought were self-drying and when the cab ride was over only my back retained a little dampness.

  “I'll call a friend of mine,” Eldritch had said when he told us we were going to his place. “She'll patch you up off the books. Here on Sargon, you have to jump through some serious hoops to get a medical permit.”

  The sorry looking apartment the freelancer dwelt in sat on the corner of 8th and Charleston like a beggar and our cab might well have been the cup that coins clanked into. I noticed that he made a point of avoiding referring to the place as 'home' – a statement that his real home was someplace else, somewhere lost to him now. He bent his sentences around that fact the way a plumber might redirect his pipes around an A/C unit.

  “I got it cheap,” he said as we made the climb to his floor – the elevator wasn't working. “I pay a year in advance. I think I might actually be the only person living here.”

  “You don't see the neighbors?” asked Mason.

  “Nope. I keep odd hours and in this part of town borrowing a cup of sugar can get you killed or raped or both.”

  His door was scarred and dented in places, perhaps from a previous tenant with outstanding bills, but the lock worked fine and looked new. When he opened the door the place was precisely what you'd expect it to be – clean but very cluttered. Stacks of hard copy formed a kind of mini-Sargon City with high-rises and low apartment blocks made from unsolved cases and the occasional coffee-cup-pinnacle. The floor was polished hardwood and the walls were a pale green color between the many collages of crime scene photos, graphs, and maps that were pinned to it. For furniture, there was a handful of odd chairs and a battered leather recliner in one corner sat under a lamp equipped with footstool and a throw which I suspected was often slept in. Beside it was a stack of fiction books with a couple of titles I recognized. There was a bedroom to the right and a kitchen to the left. That completed my assessment of the freelancer's quarters and satisfied my understanding that this was a man who lived and loved his work.

  “Sit where you can,” he said. “Freya should be here soon. Coffee?”

  “I'll take a cup,” said the soldier who seemed to have forgotten he was a prisoner. It didn't help that in the cab we'd chewed over old Martian War stories like we were buddies or something. It was always hard to hate someone who wasn't actively trying to kill you, even if he had been trying to kill you an hour earlier.

  “A cup of coffee deserves a name,” said Eldritch without a break in his stride. He was good.

  “Most people call me Mozzy. I got it on Mars. Real name is Pete Garth.”

  “Mozzy?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Got bit during jungle training and had a bad reaction. Spent six weeks in the field hospital. When the team found out that I'd been bitten in the ass they started calling me Mozzy.”

  I saw Mason tapping that name into his comms unit but Mozzy didn't seem to notice. Eldritch vanished into the kitchen with a smile and I saw the pistol sticking out of his waistband.

  “You plan on keeping that gun?” I called to him. He snorted a laugh.

  “What gun?”

  “Just don't go blowing out your brains, okay?”

  “That's not my style.”

  I looked at Pete 'Mozzy' Garth and tried not to think about my wrist which was now reaching that level of pain that brings on tears and a stomach that can't settle.

  “Was Shana special to you?” I asked. The question caught him off guard; he hadn't been expecting me to take that line.

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “She was on your team?”

  “On Mars? No. I met her after. Don't apologize for her death-”

  “I wasn't going to,” I cut in. “What's done is done. You're alive. You've got decisions to make.”

  “Doesn't look like I've got that many.” His face changed slightly. He'd kept up the military facade for long enough and now he looked tired and spent, especially when Eldritch ret
urned with cups of coffee and handed him one. It never changed. On a battlefield, you're trained to ignore the humanity of the enemy. They're targets to be eliminated, that's all. But after that, when the fighting stops, you remember that your enemy has a heartbeat and a brain and likes things like coffee and good food and laughing. Seeing Mozzy sat there in front of me reminded me of that fact although I don't think I'd ever forgotten it since training.

  “What is it you want, anyway? Surely you didn't go to all this trouble over a black-op from way-back-when?”

  “We did,” said Mason. “Do you remember the mission?”

  “Which one?” he laughed. “The General had us running all over for him. We were his personal bodyguards even though no one was trying to kill him. You guys had to go in after Noctis, right? Isaac's rescue plan?” I nodded. “After that, he'd finished with us. We got redeployed and eventually, when the war ended, we split.”

  “Until?” asked Mason. Mozzy let out a sigh and shook his head.

  “First I want a deal.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Understandable. What kind of deal?”

  “The kind that lets me go.” I shook my head.

  “No can do,” I said. “One of my team is locked up on charges of treason and-”

  “The pilot,” grinned Mozzy. “It's not hard to guess. She was the only weak link and Frankie warned Bourmont at the time. Lucky you, she was pretty hot back then.”

  “You want your brain to go for walk? Keep talking,” I said with as much composure as I could find.

  “Ah. She's that kind of friend.”

  “No,” I bit back. “She's one of my team.”

  “Shana was one of mine. You killed her. I think your sympathy vote just got squashed.”

  I stared at him and he stared back. This was proving to be another express-train to nowhere.

  “I hand you over to certain parties, maybe I get my friend back. It's that simple. Unless you have something more than that, a deal is out of the question.”

  “Certain parties?” he said.

  “They have a keen interest in nailing Bourmont. They think my friend will help them with that. I think maybe you might be able to do better.”